Beta Testing Another MMORPG
After the exact start time of closed beta stage four (or the open closed beta, as people are calling it, since everyone who has signed up for the beta can now play) of Forsaken World was only announced on the day it was supposed to start, there was a further delay of over four hours, apparently caused by a power failure at the wrongest possible time, according to them. As a result, the servers were finally up and running around 5:15 AM my time and I waited that long just to create my planned three characters, run around for a few minutes with each and take a few screenshots before finally going to bed around 6:30.
That wasn’t last night, but the one before. As a result, I then spent a part of yesterday taking my marksman and vampire for a good spin and noticing bugs, issues and potential improvements in order to post them. Then took my mage for a spin last night as well, continuing after I woke up today and posting some more issues. Really don’t like this part about being asked to post what you find on the forum instead of sending it to the support people, but I’ll try…
Still, so far I’m not impressed. Perfect World International was far more engaging early on back then. Granted that I played it in the open beta, so this is understandably in a rougher state right now, but I’m not talking about the bugs and issues. It’s simply the gameplay and the world that seem to leave a fair bit to be desired, despite the potential. Quite frankly, their idea to design their first game specifically meant for Western audiences seems to have resulted in the removal of many of the good elements that Perfect World International had and the addition of some pretty annoying ones from other current MMORPGs.
Either way, I basically didn’t play anything since the start of the year, so I’ll put a fair bit of time into this. If nothing else, I’ll just keep looking for issues and potential improvements and point them out. When you’re beta testing something it really helps if you’re a natural nitpicker, so I should be able to do well enough at that. Besides, back when I was testing Perfect World International they were saying I was doing a really good job. If they’ll take any note of what I say now as well or not is their problem.
But, between this, following the situation in Libya and the usual little bit of daily writing, you should expect me to write here even less. Or even less meaningful and perhaps shorter posts, because I’ll still struggle to at least write something twice per week, as usual. There will perhaps be some posts about Forsaken World or about gaming in general, and in fact I have one in mind already, but I can’t guarantee anything. I should at some point write some more about WikiLeaks as well, since I just dropped that issue a while ago and it really doesn’t deserve to be dropped, but right now I have no idea when…
